21.03. – 28.06.2026, something that flees the hands, Museum Kurhaus Kleve
Artists: Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino, Sultan Çoban, Rashiyah Elanga, Xheneta Imeri, Hanni Kamaly, Arthur Stachurski, Stanton Taylor & Tobias Hohn
Museum Kurhaus Kleve (MKK) and Residence NRW+ present the exhibition something that flees the hands. Works by seven international artists dialogue with parts of the museum’s current collection display. In doing so, the exhibition inscribes itself into the existing conventions of presentation and mediation at MKK, while simultaneously taking these as the subject of its own inquiry.
What escapes the hands cannot be held. It is in transition, in motion. The exhibition’s title refers to the moment in which something slips away before it can be grasped, when systems of order encounter something that resists stabilization. In this sense, the title invokes both the literal act of grasping with one’s hands and, metaphorically, non-hierarchical forms of knowledge that are mobile and ephemeral. The exhibition thus also questions the epistemological premises of the museum and seeks concrete ways of moving within and beyond them.
something that flees the hands incorporates traces of works from the preceding collection display, thereby resisting the conventional temporal sequences of art presentation. Bodies, collections, and works appear not as coherent, stable, and legible, but as being in transition. The exhibition brings together new productions and existing works that operate within this tension, between the institutional claim to legibility and control and artistic strategies of opacity and refusal. The participating artists explore the conventions and value systems that structure the collection and
display of art, as well as institutional bureaucracies and administrative procedures.
Tobias Hohn and Stanton Taylor turn their attention to the museum itself as an infrastructure. In the Service of Reality (Mass Death – Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr, Dresden) (2025–26) is a large-scale photograph developed for the exhibition. It documents artefacts and vitrines presented in the Military History Museum in Dresden, which are barely recognizable due to reflections. The work addresses museum displays that promise visibility yet obscure the objects on view and embed them within economic frameworks. Between commodity and exhibit, a distinct phenomenology of display emerges, in which what is meant to be shown becomes intangible, while underlying regimes of ownership and commodification come into view.
Xheneta Imeri engages with administrative processes and questions of belonging, particularly in relation to her own family and migration history. The works Attestation, 2001 (2024), Maillot Stade Genève, 1997 (2024), and Archives Course de l’Escalade, 1997 (2024) comprise archival materials such as a sports jersey, a photograph, and a certificate. These are connected to her father and his membership in a local sports club in Geneva, and were also used as evidence of his local engagement during his naturalization process. The works examine how objects and administrative forms are endowed with testimonial authority, and how biographies and belonging are documented and constructed.
Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino address institutional power and value systems in their conceptual works. The exhibited works Belonging (2022), Keys (2021), and Peso (2024), intervene at different points within the museum. Belonging is a score-based work drawing on collection objects; for Kleve, a small radio with receipt and a perfume in its original packaging were selected. Keys makes a copy of the museum’s master key available, inviting the risk of institutional breach. Peso translates the artist’s body weight into an equivalent volume of municipal water. Between measurability and (un)availability, grid and corporeality, Celestino’s works question how identity, value, and belonging are institutionally produced and how such attributions might shift.
Arthur Stachurski’s Handmade Prison Reliefs (2024) depict prison bars, locks, and architectural barriers. Drawing on a visual language associated with state authority, control, and punishment, the bronze works also reflect on the relationship between contemporary art and craft. They point to systems that classify, monitor, and restrict bodies, while simultaneously suggesting the fragility and arbitrariness of these orders.
The three works by Rashiyah Elanga operate between fiction and documentation. The series of staged images produced for something that flees the hands, realized as archival pigment prints, juxtaposes historically charged objects with everyday items: Congolese banknotes, matches, historical texts, and packaging materials. The compositions evoke ambiguous narrative spaces in which multiple histories overlap, Une décennie de chance (2025), replaces the portrait of French physicist Blaise Pascal on Congolese franc banknotes with that of singer Mbilia Bel. By the Blanking Press (2026) incorporates fragments of a Zaïre banknote, a currency introduced shortly after Congo’s independence and abolished in 1997. Série C 6, 1976, Bobine 45 (2026) stages an archival scene in which hands in white lace gloves evoke—and distort—the figure of the archivist. The thick, differently colored frames themselves resemble display cases, offering glimpses into systems of classification and currency.
Hanni Kamaly’s large, seemingly fragile steel sculpture George Camerbach (2022) stands precariously balanced with one foot on a mound of sand from the previous collection display. Despite the use of heavy materials such as steel, copper, and brass, the sculpture appears unstable, as if under constant pressure. Named after victims of racist violence, Kamaly’s works address absences in archives and public discourse and oppose nationalist and anti-immigration politics. Amad Ahmad (2019–2021) refers to a Syrian man who died in 2018 after being wrongfully detained in Kleve. Through their abstraction and scale, the works propose an anti-racist monumental practice that resists representation and appropriation.
Sultan Çoban’s work Berfîn, unfinished, gifts and desires (2026), Kurdish for “snow,” was developed for the exhibition and occupies the museum’s municipal wedding room. Within the historical setting of the former spa building, the installation reflects the institution of marriage from an intergenerational perspective. Incorporating materials used in traditional rituals such as dowries, it reveals how personal biographies are entangled with social conventions and economic dependencies.
Mona Hatoum’s deformed walking stick (2011), from the MKK collection, undermines any promise of stability. Made of soft silicone, the object collapses under its own weight, embodying both material and psychological fragility. For something that flees the hands, it is no longer fixed to the wall. Unsecured, it follows the logic of its material and eludes curatorial fixation—thereby calling into question the very notion of museum stability.
Curated by: Anneliese Ostertag & Antoine Simeão Schalk
Opening: Saturday, March 21, 2026, 17h00
With Telling you Berfîn, a performance by Sultan Çoban at 18h00
Biographies
Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino (born in 1989) live and work in Berlin, Germany. Through score, sculpture, text, photography, sound, and video, they address the remaining structures of the transatlantic colonial project, focusing on institutional critique, language, and objecthood. Their work has been shown in Germany and internationally, including exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig (Germany), Kunsthalle Bremen (Germany), Kunstverein Kevin Space (Austria), Galerie Molitor (Germany), Kunsthal Nord (Denmark), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), Museu Nacional da República (Brazil), Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Germany), Curitiba Biennial (Brazil), and Oscar Niemeyer Museum (Brazil). Amongst institutional collections and commissions are Kadist (France), Museu Nacional da República (Brazil), The One Minutes Foundation at Sandberg Instituut (Netherlands), and Instituto Moreira Salles (Brazil).
Sultan Çoban (born in 1994) is an artist working between Basel, Zurich, and Amsterdam. Her practice spans performance, directing, and installation, with a focus on cultural identity, memory, and self-representation. Her works combine sound, live projections, and staged elements. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from ZHdK and an MA from the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. Her work has been presented at Gessnerallee (Switzerland), Swiss Art Awards (Switzerland), Les Urbaines festival (Switzerland), and Istituto Svizzero (Switzerland).
Rashiyah Elanga (born in 1997) is currently based between Paris and Berlin. They graduated from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule (Germany) in 2022. Since then, through poetic writing, scientific research, and mythology, they have been developing a world-building practice. Recurring themes include exile, transformation, hybridity, and the idea of place, whether natural or alien. Like dreams, their worlds are self-sufficient yet interconnected. Science, myth, the internet, the history of french imperialism and their Congolese heritage all coexist in their transtemporal multiverse. They are currently exploring photography as a medium for storytelling and fiction. Although they are a multidisciplinary artist, they see themselves primarily as a fiction writer. Elanga’s work has been shown in 2025 at Galerie Sangheeut (South Korea) and Artagon (France), in 2024 at Tropez (Germany) and Galerie Deborah Schamoni (Germany), and in 2023 at Kunstverein Frankfurt (Germany) and Galerie Baleno International (Italy).
Xheneta Imeri (born in 1997) is an Albanian artist based in Geneva. She obtained her master’s degree in Visual Arts at HEAD (Switzerland) in June 2023. Her multidisciplinary approach is expressed through text, sound installation, video, sculpture, and performance. Her work draws directly from everyday life and unearths the non-events that punctuate it. In her practice, she seeks to give poetic form to these micro-situations that occur in interpersonal relationships, both online and offline. Always anchored in a perspective that questions power relations, the stories
written and told by Imeri are ways of theorizing everyday life and understanding the intimate as eminently political. Her recent projects continue to reflect a deep interest and linguistic and textual work on the languages of love and faith. In 2024, her work was exhibited at Art Genève (Switzerland), Kunsthalle St. Gallen (Switzerland), and Salle Crosnier (Switzerland). In 2025, she presented a solo exhibition at TunnelTunnel (Switzerland).
Hanni Kamaly (born in 1988)’s interdisciplinary works involve sculpture, video and performance, that investigate the process of alienation and the devaluation of the subject. Central to her practice is the human body, working as a home of the subject as well as a projection for norms, ideologies and power structures. Kamaly’s work has been exhibited at the following institutions and spaces: 2019 at Lundskonsthall (Sweden), Ginerva Gambino, (Germany), Tegel (Sweden), 2018/19 at Moderna Museet (Sweden), Luleå Biennial (Sweden) (2018/19), 2017/18 at Malmö Art Museum (Sweden), 2018 at Ahrenshoop Kunsthaus (Germany), 2017 at Skånes konstförening (Sweden), Almanac (United Kingdom), or 2016 at Rupert (Lithuania).
As a sculptor, Arthur Stachurski (born in 1991) uses material as a means of exploring how personal history intersects with mainstream or dominant discourses, typically working with minimal forms, a variety of materials, and an uneasy embodiment of craft. His most recent exhibitions include ‘Insights on Insides’ at WRG Studios in Braunschweig (Germany) and ‘Thank god for music’ at Housey in Basel (Switzerland).
Tobias Hohn & Stanton Taylor have been working together as an artist duo since 2014. Tobias Hohn (b. 1991) studied film at the University of Television and Film in Munich from 2010–2011, psychology at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf from 2012–2015, and art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2011–2020. Stanton Taylor (b. 1990) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2010–2020 and was a participant of the Berlin Program for Artists from 2024-2025. Hohn and Taylors solo exhibitions include: Galerie Max Mayer, Berlin (2026); Galerie Khoshbakht,
New York (2025); Baader-Meinhof, Omaha (2024); Alte Tankstelle Deutz, Cologne (2023); Salon Roberta, Cologne (2023); Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf (2018); and Bonner Kunstverein (2018). They have also participated in group exhibitions at Sweetwater, Berlin (2024); Bonner Kunstverein (2022); Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2022); Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf (2022); Galerie Kirchgasse, Steckborn (2021); Roter Salon / Volksbühne, Berlin (2020); Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf (2020); Ginerva Gambino, Cologne (2019); Kunstmuseum Solingen (2018); and Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2016).